Edward Said

Edward Said’s book Orientalism challenges a vast amount of scholars and their work on the Orient. Said discusses the knowledge and power, the separation of the West and East, and the obsession with the Orient. In his works he analyzes many scholars, political leaders, and military leaders justify his argument. Because Said’s work attacked years of scholarly work done by what he calls Orientalist, he received many criticisms, which would then tear apart his book just as he did. One of the larger points that Edward Said discussed was the idea of knowledge and power. In several points in his book Edward Said points out the knowledge gave the Imperial nation power over their conquest. This argument starts off with Said discussing Arthur James…

Orientalism, is a book by Edward Said in which was very influential and controversial in postcolonial studies. Said redefined the term “Orientalism.” He defined it as a constellation of untrue assumptions expressing how the western attitudes toward the East were romanticized. Said starts off his book with the fact that the Orient played a key role in the “construction” of European and American culture, “the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the west) as its contrasting image, idea,…

This book offers an explanation of Edward Said 's evaluation of contemporary society by stressing the religious/secular division. Hart argues that this division is equally factual and metaphorical: It addresses spiritual and worldly customs, but also allegories that broaden the connotation and position of faith and secularism in an undetermined manner. Incorporating reviews and critiques of Said will help me present a rounded, unbiased view of his work within my dissertation. In this article,…

analysis’. Postcolonial criticism emerged with Edward W. Said’s Orientalism, it acquired the name ‘postcolonialism’ in the late 1980s. It is concerned with historical, political, cultural and textual outcomes of the encounter between the West and East. Initially it aimed at reviewing critically the conditions of colonialism and its aftermath. Postcolonial criticism analyses the relationship between coloniser and colonised, from the initial encounter of the…

category of Orientalist discourse, that Edward Said criticizes. Basically on the way travel narratives have described the Middle East and to what extent they were partial to the origins as Easterners. Edward Said states his interest on the Orientalism when he discovered the big difference between the Middle East where he lived and grew and the image of the Middle East in the eyes of the Eastern. Before he used the term of Orientalism in his book Orientalism, it was used generally by…

(1990) and The Location of Culture (1994). He, a diasporic person like Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak has popularized postcolonial theory by giving new terms such as, Hybridity, Mimicry, The other, etc. to it. His contribution to postcolonial studies is noteworthy…

Compare & Contrast Essay (Rough Draft) To many people, the word “other” means not this one, but that one; or the alternative one not the same one. It also has a much larger definition that can be more relevant to a person or a place. Different or distinct from the one or ones already mentioned or implied, and a group or a member of a group that is perceived as different, foreign, strange, etc. These last two definitions are more accurate definitions of this study. A compare and a contrast essay…

More than Genies and Spirits: The presence of Feminist Characters in old Arab Stories In her book titled The Hidden Face of Eve, Naawal El Saadawi an Egyptian writer writes that “Woman is at her best and most powerful when she takes on the form of a genie or spirit in A Thousand and One Nights. Men fall victims to her beauty and her spells and go through suffering and even torture to gain her favour.” (, P. 162) In this passage, El Saadawi expresses an opinion that is very popular within the…

The simple fascination with the exotic East has evolved into a cloudy perception of the Orient. The artistic minds of many dancers, composers, and choreographers began making false generalizations of various aspects of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and Eastern Cultures. According to public intellectual and theorist; Edward Said, Orientalism is the “general patronizing Western attitude towards Middle Eastern, Asian and North African cultures based on underdeveloped theories and fabrications that…

Time’, ‘space’, ‘place’ are some of the frequently used (sometimes misused) terms in literature, and they have been defined in different ways and from various theoretical perspectives. In the colonial discourse, in particular, the concept ‘place’ was closely related to knowledge and power in so far as the process of mapping the ‘other spaces ‘ was deployed to reproduce dominant world view. While the tenants of imperialism are teleological, its practices have always been geographic. As Edward…